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Ananda Devi

Biography

Ananda Devi was born on 23 March 1957 in Trois-Boutiques, Mauritius, an island particularly notable for its confluence of diverse ethnic, cultural and linguistic identities. A descendent from Andhra Pradesh in India on her mother’s side, and Creole on her father’s, conversant in Telegu, Creole, French, and English, as well as Bhojpuri and Hindi, Devi in many ways encapsulates both the hybridity of Mauritian culture and the singularity of the individual Mauritian. Indeed, as she herself has stated in an interview with Patrick Sultan in December 2001, and to which her literature often testifies, to be Mauritian is always to be both multiple and particular: ‘faire partie de tous ces mondes, et à travers un processus de synthèse et de syncrétisme, en extraire quelque chose de neuf et d’authentique’.

Displaying a prodigious writing talent, Devi won her first literary prize at the age of fifteen for a short story in a Radio France Internationale competition. She went on to concentrate on ethnology and anthropology over the next few years, her studies culminating in a doctoral thesis at the School for Oriental and African Studies in London. In the meantime, Devi continued to develop her literary career, working as a translator and publishing a collection of short stories, Solstices, in the late 1970s. During the 1980s and 1990s, Devi’s primary focus returned to literature, and she produced a handful of texts through Indian Ocean and African publishing houses, including her first novel Rue la Poudrière.

After a few years spent in Congo-Brazzaville, Devi moved to Ferney-Voltaire in Switzerland in 1989, publishing Le Voile de Draupadi and L’Arbre fouet with L’Harmattan in the 1990s, and Moi, l’interdite with Dapper in 2000. With an increasing readership, both popular and academic, across the French-speaking world, Devi’s next novel Pagli was published in 2001 in Gallimard’s ‘Continents noirs’ collection. The beginning of the millennium proved a particularly productive time for Devi, with Soupir, La Vie de Joséphin le fou, and the collection of poetry, Le Long Désir, following in quick succession. Her next novel, Ève de ses décombres, was met with tremendous critical acclaim and published in Gallimard’s ‘Collection blanche’, followed by Indian Tango and, most recently, Le Sari vert.

The island of Mauritius acts as a backdrop to the majority of Devi’s texts and she is particularly interested in exploring the experience of alterity within the confines of the Indo-Mauritian world. Above all, her work considers the construction and confinement of femininity in such a society from varying positions of marginality and liminality – among them, madness, trauma, illness, disability, prostitution, adultery and homosexuality. Despite her focus on representations of suffering and the struggle for autonomy – and at times examples of extreme violence and destruction – Devi’s writing is generally characterised by an intimate poetic and lyrical style. Equally, the social realities that are brought to the fore are often framed within narratives that draw upon fantastical and poetical elements that serve to displace identity, temporality and narrative representation.

Devi’s writing has been translated into several languages, though to date only Pagli is available in English translation (translated by Devi herself). Currently, Devi lives and writes in Switzerland, and is considered to be one of the most important and exciting francophone Mauritian writers on the contemporary scene.